A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence. Science is more complex, but at a simple level you can say the premise of science is to believe things that have strong evidence. Opposites. Everyone knows this on an intuitive level. Let us assume for arguments sake that religions are all true.

Let's take Christianity for example. If Christianity was evidence based and very likely to be true... Why isn't Christianity called a science?

Why isn't biology called a religion? What is the fundamental difference in categorization if both biology and Christianity (or any other religion you want to put in place of Christianity) are real concepts?

What is it in our subconscious that is causing us to categorize some things as science and other things as religion when both are true and real aspects of reality? Why does this categorization exist? If physics is true and biology is true and Christianity is true, how come only Christianity falls into the religion categorization and physics and biology fall into science?

The answer is trivial. It is because on some level all humans, including you know that religion is "less true" then science. You can see the difference. You know that mythological beliefs like walking on water or coming back from the dead are on Shakey less evidence based grounds.

Everything in science has a high bar for verification. We trust it because it lets our engines run and our planes fly, and every human knows that religious claims have a much lower bar and are less trust worthy.

Again my claim is that the fact that you can categorize aspects of the world as either religion or science, it shows that at a subconscious level you are aware of this dichotomy even when you believe both science and religion are real.

So what I'm saying is you already know that science and religion are contradictory. But your surface level beliefs and behavior are masking this subconciouse awareness.

I linked to a simulation of an artificial cell [1] in a different comment, I’ll toss the link here too. As I said there, this is not the way the universe works, but I think this approach to simulation may support real thought (ignoring time and memory requirements). It supports cell division.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a...

>It's a system designed to mimic the external behavior of humans, and it's being prompted in ways that elicit the desired responses. The superstitious responses some people have to this are predictable, but not rational.

Your claim is, given a conversation thread that appears to be between two sentient beings your claim is that one of these beings is not sentient and is only imitating sentience in a way that is indistinguishable from actual sentience.

This is an actual possibility. What you say may be true. The irrationality occurs because this claim is possible for ALL possible conversation threads here on HN.

The conversation between the chatbot is indistinguishable from an actual conversation between two humans YET with no additional evidence you are able to claim that the chatbot is imitating sentience. You can say the same thing for all conversations here on HN. Yet you only make that claim exclusively for the chatbot conversation without additional evidence. Making new claims with no additional evidence is irrational.

That being said MY claim is that the evidence presented by this person is convincing and compelling but not definitive. The rationality here is actually really straightforward.

  1. All previous evidence of conversations with AI were significantly less complex. 
  2. All previous evidence of conversations with AI showed OBVIOUS signs of not being sentience.

No argument with that.

>The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence

But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things. Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to evidence based science. A contradiction only arises if the religion makes doctrinal claims about scientific matters - for example, there are those who believe that the Earth is 4000 years old.

However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

Well that's quacking like a duck. This isn't some chess AI being good at a game. This is an AI that can speak directly telling you it's alive and has a soul.

Is LaMDA far enough? Maybe not, but the text transcript provided is extremely close to passing the Turing Test. And if an AI is so sophisticated it perfectly replicated humans ability to communicate, philosophize, create art, and perform science it is irrational to say it should be treated differently than a sapient human.